The (Sports Marketing) World is Flat – Hot sports trend: Cricket

If you’ve checked out this blog more than once during the six weeks of existence, you know I have a thing (obsession?) for cricket. I’m not running around looking for it, but it just keeps popping up. The latest example? The NY Times ran a story in their Saturday Metro section ostensibly about author Joseph O’Neill, whose new book, Netherland, features the sport heavily. Really the article was about cricket in NYC.

Maybe it’s just a New York thing, but I’m starting to think that cricket is going to become a hot trend in the States. Not the sport necessarily, but the cricket lifestyle. I can see Phat Farm using the style cues of the cricket sweater; or maybe the cricket floppy hat for days at the park/beach/pool.

The game has all the right cool factors for U.S. trend-setters, with its elitist history, international flavor and general ‘unknown-ness.’

We used cricket to make a couple of lighthearted vids to promote our Australian online business.
The two players involved are legends. David Boon – fondly known as the “short backward square from Tasmania” is probably not cool per se, although his stoic ruggedness has given him cult status in many cricket circles. I have met Ian “Beefy” Botham and would have to say he has a laddish coolness.
Check it out http://www.metacafe.com/watch/344308/episode_one_worldwide_launch_beefy_botham_cops_one_for_the_te/

Cricket is to Australians what baseball is to Americans, our natioanl boring sport. You guys don’t need another boring sport, you have a perfectly good brain dead one of your own. We like ours, thank you. It is perfectly pitched for beer drinking, low key chatting and slacking off work (sorry, mate, can’t come into today. Got the dreaded lurgie.) and then taking off for cricket.

Meanwhile, cricket is the national language of some expats in the United States. Whenever we stay at an Indian run hotel or restaurant, or meet someone from the West Indies, they’ll tentatively ask whether we are Aussies. That is an ice breaker, creating friendships wherever we go. Their grimaces turn into smiles …